I was strolling with my parentsthrough the National Postal Museum in Washington last October—a rare day off the Donald Trump trapeze—when I peered at Twitter and saw that I, like so many other reporters before and since, had suddenly drawn Trump’s ire.

Six hundred miles to the south, in Norcross, Georgia, at one of his biggest rallies to date, the Republican presidential front-runner was railing against me over a story I hadn’t even written yet. Trump, it turned out, was steamed about a report I had planned to file about his failed businesses—not exactly virgin journalistic territory—and for some reason, he was treating his audience to a dramatic reading of my banal, businesslike emails to the former PR flack for Ivanka Trump’s fashion line who now served as his press secretary.

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“So we have this guy. I don’t know his name,” Trump said, before proceeding to stretch it out like a piece of sour taffy. “B-e-nnnnnn Schreckinger! Every single article is a horror show. I’m winning in the polls—he said I should’ve done better!”

Why me? I’m no Bob Woodward. Or Megyn Kelly, for that matter. Just a junior politics reporter for Politico who, by that point, had been covering Trump for all of three months. I’d been to a half-dozen of his rallies and I’d probably written 30 Trump stories.

Yes, his aides had yelled at me on the phone and berated me in person; I figured this was standard for covering a high-stakes campaign and didn’t take it too personally. But this was suddenly pretty personal. It’s hard to describe how I felt reading the tweets. Why was a man who was seeking the highest office in the land suddenly so fixated on me? It was disturbing and also, oddly, a bit thrilling to be name-checked by a celebrity who can elevate anyone from obscurity, even if he was insulting me.

Of course, the stakes were a bit different then. This was before Trump’s relationship with the media became a central storyline of the 2016 presidential race; before his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, arm-squeezed Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields and police got involved; before the wider world noticed Trump was goading his crowds to turn to the press pen and taunt the reporters stuck inside; before he began the widespread banning of news organizations (including mine) from his must-watch press conferences.

In fact, Trump’s Norcross speech turned out to be a mild preview of the wild half-year to follow, a period that saw Trump rapidly shift, in the eyes of the media and the voters, from a reality-show joke to a legitimate front-runner—not to mention a threat that has united the Democratic and GOP establishments in a last-ditch effort to stop him.

Brian P. Kelly; Alex Isenstadt; @unclehenry

This, needless to say, did not occur to me all at once. Like previous generations of rookie campaign reporters, I figured I’d have months to learn the ropes. Instead, in my first full-time job out of college I was thrust into the middle of the most important battle between the press and a politician in generations.

Here’s what I learned. A candidate who puts reporters in pens, who talked as much about me as about the Islamic State at a big rally, who thinks it’s a good idea to revisit the First Amendment, isn’t really winning—or he wouldn’t be doing those things. Sure, Trump has proven to be brilliant at branding himself and projecting a simple, powerful message—“Make America Great Again”—that resonates with his supporters. But presidential candidates—especially one like Trump, who started the campaign with already near-universal name recognition—aren’t there to win every news cycle or show every cub reporter who’s the boss. They’re looking for votes, not Twitter victories.

Yet here was Trump making me—and other reporters who crossed him, or merely seemed to Trump to be crossing him—a big part of the story. That, I eventually realized, was the problem for his campaign. Trump’s essential smallness, his focus on winning tiny, unimportant skirmishes with the press—an approach that served him so well in the New York tabloid fishbowl that helped make him a household name—would increasingly come to jeopardize any chance he had of winning the White House.

I certainly wasn’t the only reporter to incur his wrath, but I had a very close-up view of the ways—private and public—that Trump and his campaign staff blended flattery, intimidation and isolation to try to silence critical coverage. Over time, it wore awfully thin. At first, the press pack I traveled in was as amazed as everybody else by the success of the Trump show, and like the rest of the world, we wondered at its staying power and off-the-charts ratings. It was a wild ride, and it was even sort of fun. But eventually, the Trump traveling press corps came to seethe silently at its daily degradation inside a Secret Service-guarded cage—the stress of our jobs compounded by a hostile candidate, a hostile campaign, hostile crowds and, eventually, creeping worries about how history would judge us.

Then again, that was still to come on that fall day I stood in the middle of the Postal Museum, staring down at my iPhone as my parents looked on. When I told them Trump was blasting me from the stage, my mother laughed. She thought it was hilarious.

My lawyerly father didn’t. He sensed the whole thing was spiraling out of control. “Be careful,” he told me.

***

It all began uneventfully. In earlyJuly, a couple of weeks after Trump announced he was running, Republican candidates were blanketing New Hampshire, decrying the country’s ruin over the sunny holiday weekend, and I was dispatched to cover it. “Could you write something funny about it?” one of my editors asked. Oh, and speaking of funny, would Donald Trump be there?

No, as it turned out. But a few days later, Trump’s press secretary, Hope Hicks—the steely former spokeswoman for the candidate’s daughter Ivanka—alerted me that Trump would be going to Las Vegas in three days. Trump in Vegas seemed even funnier. I asked for a sit-down with the candidate, and Hicks, to my surprise, granted it.

“Mr. Trump would be more than happy to have you,” Hicks emailed me. “But it’s a bit complicated. Give me a call.”

Photographers barter for space to capture Donald Trump’s stage exit while Hope Hicks, the candidate’s media handler, stands by at a rally in De Pere, Wisconsin. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

It didn’t happen. As I would come to learn, “complicated” in Trump-speak means something closer to “maybe Tuesday, or maybe never.” Still not understanding that an offer of a Trump interview was just the first step in a negotiation, I flew at the last minute to Phoenix for what I thought was part one of a two-part sit-down. I figured I’d get him after the rally I would also cover that weekend.

Already, Trump was becoming less of a joke and more of a real—and very unpredictable—factor in the Republican race. A backlash had grown into a full-fledged uproar over the three weeks since he had claimed in his announcement speech that undocumented Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals. At the Phoenix Convention Center, I witnessed the backlash to the backlash. There were protests outside and protests inside, where 4,000 people had packed in to hear Trump speak. What struck me was a small—but I thought telling—sign of how the campaign played fast and loose, putting out a crowd photo of the rally on social media with the caption, “This is what 15,000 people looks like.” Never mind that the ballroom’s maximum occupancy was 2,158 (the fire marshal had allowed in twice that number), a detail I mentioned in my story and did not think much more of until later.

After Trump’s post-rally news conference, Hicks—often the good cop in these matters—tried to get me through a back door with the candidate when a man with a buzz cut and an earpiece shut me out, saying Trump was too tired to talk to me.

A few days later, after more back and forth, Hicks did in fact deliver, persuading Trump to call me that Wednesday. After all the build-up, the 10-minute chat was anticlimactic. He was restrained, even avuncular, on the phone. I asked him which of his opponents would make the worst president. “I don’t want to say that, because that would be disrespectful,” he responded. We headlined the interview, “Trump Grows Up.”